Phone Your Blog

July 1, 2010

Matt

A broken telephone I saw while wandering around Bangkok

It’s happened to all of us. The night starts off innocently enough with a little gin and tonic, maybe a mojito, then next thing you know you’re doing tequila shots with the bartender and the girl from Brazil and you find yourself thinking it would be a treMENdous idea to call up your ex and see how they’re doing and perhaps impress them with your newfound wit.

We’ve got the cure. Now, instead of drunk dialing random friends, lovers, and acquaintances one at a time, what if you could dial your blog and talk to the whole world at once? It’d be like something out of Star Trek.

Right now this is completely free, but we’ll charge you money to take down posts. Just kidding! We’re making it free and allowing recording lengths up to sixty minutes, but that limit may go down without a paid upgrade in the future. Mostly we’re just curious to see how people use this.

I have a few ideas myself, but to find out you’ll have to listen to this voice post:

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Wow…this sounds MOST interesting!!!!
Sometimes, “writing” on a phone is really the most unhappening thing to happen!!!
You have given a perfect solution for that!!! AWESOME!
You guys seriously rock!!!
Thanks a ton!!!!

You are so generous Mr. Matt. Thank you for sharing this with all of us at WordPress. It sounds wonderful. We are so fortunate to be a part of your wonderful network. But I think we all know that…..:>) Elena “Just My Thoughts.”

You are making it too easy to embarrass oneself!
I am glad sometimes for that cooling down time between- when I think it and when I write it. Especially when I have been oiled a bit with a Manhattan!
Now it will be immediate— I bet the blogs will be very interesting though.

As you’ve described it, Matt, Mojito induced voice message broadcast over a blog to your ex – whoa!
Hope you’ve built in a “use at your own risk” disclaimer!

And you gave me a good laugh with your “just kidding” about incurring a fee to remove a message from the blog (presumably the next day when the affects of the decision make the decision seem not such a great idea after all!)

But as always with WordPress – excellent technology, potentially great idea.
I think I’ll belt out a tune for my first try at it!

no way… that’s crazy amazing! haven’t been that excited about a wordpress improvement in a while… though honestly my blog is very photo based but still. i’ll be an avid reader of those phone blog posts.

This is a good innovation after a long time. Although from evolutionary perspective, the audio should have been popularized prior to the video, which youtube did, but either case, the blogging via audio using the new technologies is a good evolutionary step. I only wish you had approached video the same way (make it plenty, make it easy and make it available for free like you tube) but IMHO, premium videopress was a missed opportunity given the success of chatroulette etc.

WordPress.com is really bring us cutting edge features! Now I’m not too keen on getting drunk and talking to my blog, but I see phoning the blog could be a useful feature for a number of us. Thanks for your staying current with new possibilities.

I used to use a similar feature on LJ but they provided us with a UK number (eventually). I think only paid accounts allowed phone posts though. I’d LOVE to post something by phone but I’m not going to ring the US to do it.

Hmmm… maybe when you speak, there should be a breathalyzer? Or at least a “read back ” and “are you SURE that you want to make this public”? last chance bail out option.
Of course, the other side of the coin is enabling the camera phone feature to enhance the experience.
Thanks WordPress.

Omgomgomg! This might be the most awesome thing I’ve heard of in a long time 😛 PLEASE add international numbers (Sweden in particular 😉 ).

Oh, and it would be great if the recording didn’t post right away if you didn’t want it to. I’d like to use this wonderful feature to record drafts as a sort of memo thing, when you don’t have a computer or pen with you 😀

This is just genius! The quality is poor but it’d be great for important notices you want to post on your blog quickly! I’ve had some important notices that I had to put up on my blog in a hurry, but I wasn’t near my computer so I had to use my Kindle e-reader’s internet. Do you have any idea how slow that is? The brilliant thing about this new feature is that it’s so obvious that no one ever thinks of it! There should be a separate WordPress number that, when you call, says something like: “Hello. Please type in your username and press 1, then type in your password and press 2.” Then, when you type in your username and password, it should say: “You have had 63 views today. 54 click have been reported on your blog. 34 people used search engine terms to find your blog. You have 7 new comments, 3 of which are spam. Press 1 to hear what search engine terms have been used to locate your blog. Press 2 to hear what links have been clicked. Press 3 to hear the 7 new comments. Press 4 to phone your blog.” I think something like that would be EXTREMELY helpful!

“Come here Watson!” Nice voice Matt, fun idea I’ll have to wrap my mind around this and see what I can come up with. I like your idea to see what people do in the wee hours of the morning and also charging a fee to take down posts. :+) That could really turn out to be a good little side business!

Here’s why I love this idea. I live in Houston and before/during/after Hurricane Ike I used email to let friends and family know how we were faring. One reason I started my blog is so that I could just post about our situation and let friends and family check in on us. Once the power went out…no more status reports. Through it all, though, we never lost phone service. So if a hurricane strikes again, I can let everyone know how we’re doing with one phone call to my blog. Brilliant!

Even better, once the ‘post’ has appeared on your Blog, you can then amend the status to Draft, Pending, etc. plus add some text, categories. Presumably, one could also weave a number of audio files into a single Post with supportive text.

Fantastic feature! We will soon start to sail again from Portugal via Cape Verde, to Brazil and south to the Falklands, Argentina, South Georgia to South Africa and over back to Brazil, we keep a blog in Swedish. Since we will be at sea a whole lot, approximately 100 days this feature came in a LOT more then handy. Writing blog post over a satellite link with a price of 5 USD/post and 1 USD / minute will do make an easy choise on our shoestring budget 😉

Strange idea — I’m not sure I even want to know what the developers were thinking at the time they decided to write it! Perhaps they were actually thinking along the lines of the opening paragraphs of this blog entry. Scary.

Nevertheless, this feature could come in handy, I suppose. I can picture a blogger covering a live event, wanting to get something important up on his blog as soon as possible, or perhaps the same blogger might want to demonstrate the surrounding sounds of the venue. Not sure this feature will catch on, but it’s certainly something to watch. Very interesting.

Nice feature. The idea here is not to embarrass yourself by drunk-dialing few people, do it on large scale by posting it on the web. I wonder how much alcohol was consumed before the idea for this feature came about.

WOW.. keep blowing our minds away WordPress.
This will definitely eliminate “writer’s block”… because there’s no such thing as “speaker’s block”. 😀
Now this is real social media, the world is turning into something else.
Great job guys.